Greek left: election success
Posted on Tuesday 18 September, 2007
Filed Under International
The Greek left won an absolute majority of the votes in Sunday’s snap general election. Pasok – broadly the equivalent of the Labour Party – scored 38.1% and secured 102 seats. That’s its worst result since 1977, incidentally.
But the Communist Party polled 8.2% and got 22 MPs, while the Coalition of the Radical Left picked up 5.0% and 14 seats.
The Coalition includes Diethnistiki Ergatiki Aristera (Internationalist Workers’ Left) a 2001 split from the International Socialist Tendency led by the British SWP. It is friendly with the International Socialist Organization in the US. Anybody know if any DEA people made it into parliament? That’s their paper on the left, by the way.
Trade union opposition to pension reform and widespread anger over the incompetent way the centre-right government of Costas Karamanlis handled the recent forest fires were some of the factors at work.
Yet despite the left winning the backing of a collective 51.3% of the electorate, Karamanlis’s outfit New Democracy picked up a two-seat lead, enabling him to form his second administration.
The other bad news is that far right has parliamentary representation for the first time since the collapse of military rule in 1974.
UPDATE: The key point here is that Greek experience confirms the lessons of France, Italy, Germany, Portugal, Holland, Scotland, and perhaps Wales and Sweden.
The far left’s only hope of having any real influence on national politics in western European nations is to constitute itself as the revolutionary pole of attractions inside a genuinely democratic and pluralist socialist formation.
Not too hard a concept to grasp, is it? The pity is, it seems utterly beyond the comprehension of the two contending London-based cliques that lead British Trotskyism. Lead it down a dead end, that is.
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12 Responses to “Greek left: election success”
“The Greek left won an absolute majority in Sunday’s snap general election.”
Errr, no it didn’t. The right-wing ND party won 152 of the 300 available seats.
“The Greek left won an absolute majority in Sunday’s snap general election.”
Errr, no it didn’t. The right-wing ND party won 152 of the 300 available seats.
yes a good result for syriza (radical left) and the kke.
unfortunately, some groups on the far-left, such as the sek (swp affiliate), instead of supporting either of these two left parties, decided to stand as ‘anti-capitalist’, receiving 10,000 votes. what a waste of time. they should have supported the larger left parties (i’d suggest syriza) and argued for it to adopot a clear socialist anti-capitalist programme. anyway it makes no difference in the end.
for those who would like to see a party of the left in britain see my new blog:
http://foranewleftparty.blogspot.com/
comradely,
ks
It must be great having a progressive left party to vote for and know that they will at least get some seats. The political situation in the UK is dire(as i’m sure you all agree) and very worrying,
Is it possible that Bob Wareing, the United Socialists(l’pool dockers) red pepper people, and others could form a non aligned left?
the left should take the opportunity and unite around bob’s campaign
use the chance to argue for and take steps towards creating a new party of the left
anyway see my blog for my comments on this!
http://foranewleftparty.blogspot.com/
Greek left: election success – ie in letting the right stay in.
It’s almost a dictionary definition of ultra left. PASOK members might take issue with your description of their party too – the ones I’ve met have always denied being social democrats.
Mikael said
“The Greek left won an absolute majority in Sunday’s snap general election.”
Errr, no it didn’t. The right-wing ND party won 152 of the 300 available seats.
——————————————
That’s a selective quote. The original was:
“The Greek left won an absolute majority of the votes in Sunday’s snap general election.”
That was true.
What nonsense this post is the far left in Greece has been shown to be marginal and irrelevant to the mass of the working class. On the one hand we have the DEA tail-ending the former Euro-Stalinists and on the other the rest of the revolutionary left fails dismally to register anything of substance.
Better if the DEA had joined with the SEK and OKDE-Spartakos in agitating for extra-parliamentary opposition to ND. Once again these elections prove that bourgeois elections are rarely a useful forum for revolutionaists to raise our flag.
Exile,
Not true I am afraid. The original was: “The Greek left won an absolute majority in Sunday’s snap general election.” – I should know, ’cause I just copy-pasted it! Your quote is Dave’s clarification – no doubt a result of my remark.
Yes indeed, I clarified on account of Mikael’s remark.
And LoTB – that’s why I said ‘broadly equivalent’ to the LP. Pasok are still in the Socialist International, no?
PASOK & SI: They were pretty late joiners, actually.
Few of us Real Blairites would recognise ST as one of us. He has been cheerleading for Gordon since the minute he lost his seat.
I don’t see why there is such venom for him, though. He’s never hidden his politics or talked left while acting right or any of those things.
By the way, the fact that a bloke once had too much to drink at a Christmas party and then got arrested for being drunk in a public place is hardly crime of the century. Rather less heinous than, say, saluting Saddam or creeping to Milosevic
Greek elections show mounting discontent, a victory for Communist Party of Greece (KKE)
by Laura Petricola, People’s Weekly World Newspaper, 09/20/07
ATHENS, Greece — The Sept. 16 parliamentary elections here handed the conservative New Democracy Party a 4-percentage-point re-election victory over the liberal opposition PASOK party.
New Democracy won 42 percent of the vote and PASOK got 38 percent. Greece’s “unreconstructed” communist party, the Communist Party of Greece (KKE) won 8.2 percent, an increase of 2.3 percentage points over 2004, and Siriza, a left-wing coalition party, got 5 percent of the national vote.
LAOS, a populist, religious-oriented right-wing party, got into Parliament for the first time with 3.8 percent.
Only 74 percent of the nearly 1 million registered voters cast ballots. The lower turnout reflects a steadily increasing trend towards abstention by Greek voters, which polls have linked to disillusionment with the two-party system.
The KKE nearly doubled the number of deputies it will have in Parliament, to 22. In large city centers, the vote for the KKE was 10-12 percent, reaching as high as 18-19 percent in some working-class neighborhoods. The KKE vote was highest among working people in the private sector and among youth, the unemployed, the self-employed and small farmers.
In the countryside, in villages that put up strong resistance to the Nazi occupation during World War II, the Communist vote was particularly impressive. Along the same lines, islands that were used to exile Communists by the postwar, right-wing dictatorship also posted high vote tallies for the KKE. The former exile island of Ikaria (Dodecanese), for example, handed the KKE a first place showing with 36 percent of the vote.
The election results represent a victory for KKE, which has been slowly but steadily increasing its political power in the post-1991 era, having doubled its percentage of the vote since that time. The party said its vote tally reflects support for the actions and struggles it has led over a period of years, combined with a widening radicalism in Greece, with many voters casting a ballot for the KKE for the first time.
While the ruling-class parties, New Democracy and PASOK, still command the lion’s share of the electorate’s support, they lost significant votes to KKE and to the other alternative parties.
Young voters particularly, age 18-24, turned their backs on the two-party system. This reflects the shift in voter consciousness, as working people increasingly turn away from center-right and center-left positions.
Both New Democracy and PASOK push the neoliberal agenda of “free trade” and privatization that is dictated by the European Union. These policies are steadily forcing the vast majority of working families here into economic ruin and, as one KKE election poster warned, the worst may be yet to come.
The incumbent New Democracy Party also came under criticism during the election for its mishandling of the fight against widespread wildfires last month.
What is clear is that the high vote for the two dominant parties does not correspond to the level of strong popular discontent.
As a result, the KKE calls for “organized and intensive action in cooperation with radical forces that are developing to build a strong popular front against the anti-people measures New Democracy will promote.”
It said that through mass action, “forces that are still entrapped in the two-party logic” can be won to more left-wing positions.
Source:
http://www.pww.org/article/articleview/11745/1/391
Other sources:
Site of KKE
http://inter.kke.gr/ english
http://www.kke.gr/kke_ru.html russian
http://fr.kke.gr/ french
Daily newspaper of KKE
http://www.rizospastis.gr/